Guest Blog 13

A vision of a Participatory Probation co-operative or an alternative to TR

I will start with revolution and end with probation. In its simplest form arguments on the left of politics have seen two principle classes driving history forward; an “Owning Class” that exploits the “Working Class”. Recently Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel have argued that a key third class exists with an equally pivotal role in making history. They named this class the "Coordinating Class". 

In reality the Coordinator Class are the managers. They are a tier of people who manage their work and the work of others: CEOs, bankers, big lawyers, and politicians at the top level, but managers in the public sector and in the new Third Sector are part of the Coordinator Class. They are the go-betweens for the capitalists and the workers and they have an overwhelming monopoly over empowering work. What they say goes, or you are out on your ear. They are managers of themselves and others. They develop their own economic interests; they compete with workers and one another to continue to hold onto a disproportionate share of empowering/interesting work. Okay that’s the end of the theory bit, lets move on to the Revolution.

In the case of the Russian Revolution, the original Soviets were set up to be open and democratic, to be run by the workers for the workers; full participation of all was to be the basis of the first Soviets. However, as time went on the managers/coordinators started to make the majority of the major/empowering decisions and as always, they made more and more decisions in their own interests and ultimately the Revolution was corrupted. The coordinators became a power elite and the democratic essence of the first Soviets was crushed; in the end this class of managers led to the purges and the death of millions.

The above is an example of the old adage that power corrupts all who hold it and it is part of the narrative that nothing can be done to stop people from being corrupted and nothing can stop the powerful. Indeed in the Probation Service we have our own examples of corruption and power and we have our very own class of coordinators. I’m sure that former NAPO leaders came into post with the best of intentions, but over time they were corrupted by power and started to serve their own interests, the rest is our history.

So if power corrupts is it possible to create a democratic participatory Probation Cooperative?

If a few people hold the decision making powers in any organisation, how can we stop the bastards from turning into a power elite or from serving the existing elite? Probation management is a good example of this phenomenon. Without question we have witnessed probation management doing the bidding of those in the MoJ and NOMS who are driven by a mix of what is know as managerialism and neoliberalism, ideologies that argue that managers and the markets know best. The mantra trotted out on every occasion is that the state is bad and the market is king and if it is said often enough it is accepted. The mantra is taken to heart by the greasy pole climbers when all the evidence from the privatised sections of the state (Transport, Utilities, Banks, education, NHS, the Post Office and all forms of Community Care) is that it is an unmitigated disaster, but the fools press on.

The first thing we need to do in order to create our Probation Cooperative is to dispose of the managers because we know they have been or soon will be corrupted. So who will do the managing you may ask and the answer is we will. We know we can’t ask Jim, Joanna, Netnipper and their mates to make the decisions because in the end they too will turn into lying ruthless bastards. No, Albert and Hahnel argue that Power must be rotated continually. This is the only way to stop the corrupting process. 

Many will say this is idealist clap-trap, you need managers to free others from the bureaucracy, or they may say that many people will not make good managers. To this I say that one hundred years ago all doctors were male; today over fifty per cent and increasing are female. In the Probation Service and in society at large, we share very similar abilities and given the chance most of us could do most jobs. Indeed eighty per cent of the working class would make good or excellent brain surgeons. They don’t because they don't get the chance, not because they do not have the ability and as Probation staff we know this.

The rotation of power can be achieved by limiting the time any person can be  part of the decision making body of the cooperative or better, by all people making the decisions together. Fridays could be set out as a time for debate and voting or the last three days in the month could or the last three weeks in the year, there are endless combinations. The  fully participating membership would decide; real democracy, because this is what we are talking about. It isn’t easy, we will have to work at it, but it's got to be better than what we have now.

Democracy at work means we all have a voice in how and what we do in the workplace. Democracy at work means the end of hierarchical structures, to be replaced by horizontal that are by dint democratic structures and processes. However, to be truly democratic, the probation cooperative would need to be fully participatory. What I mean by this is that each person would need to as involved in the organisation as much as he/she can possibly be. Hierarchy would be replaced by community and fear of the boss by support for our fellow workers. The Probation Service would be a perfect pilot for such an organisation, ether as a cooperative or within the Public Sector. We know that cognitively  probation staff are similar and we know from the last fifteen years that we would be able to rotate most tasks with ease. PSOs become POs and clerical staff become PSOs and Probation Officers and all of us can undertake management tasks with little effort. By sharing and rotating decision making, we keep hierarchy and corruption at bay.

Albert and Hahnel go on to talk about “Shared Job Complexes”. What they mean by this is that each persons job should be a mix of good and not so good tasks and we do this all the time in Probation. Each of us would have turns: “acting up” and cleaning the bog, writing reports, court duty, home visits and so on. There would be no hierarchical division of labour, no SPOs clerical workers or Probation Officers, importantly we would decide how its done in the workplace. Nothing would be foisted on us by the brutes at NOMS or the MoJ, this is why I think this type of working lends itself better to a cooperative organisation rather than the Public Sector. However, it could work in the Public Sector if they gave us enough freedom, but that ain't going to happen anytime soon.

We will all have to do the horrible parts of the job too, telling people that they need to improve certain skills or put a little more effort into the job. This would be achieved in solidarity and with genuine support not via fear or greasy pole climbing. Because we all share the same tasks, we will be much better placed than current management to see who is not pulling their weight or when someone needs more support.

Remuneration in a Probation Cooperative could be set this way. Workers who work longer or harder or at more onerous conditions (cleaning the toilet, working with difficult clients) would earn proportionally more for doing so. And others who wanted to work part time or do less onerous tasks would be paid less. Again we the members would decide exactly how.

There are millions of people currently employed in varying forms of cooperatives: over eighty thousand work in Mondragon in Spain, thousands work in cooperative movement in the UK and thousands are employed in radical cooperatives in South America. Perhaps it's an idea whose time has come. 

On a personal note and I need to be a little coy here lest I blow my cover, in my place of work we have had little management input for six years and three of us have had a free hand in designing the work we do and we have had much success. So much so that a report has been written on our model of work and it was suggested that others in the area should adopt it. However, when Grayling entered the fray, that was the end of that. 

The three people involved had different ideas of how to work, but because no one was senior to the other, the way we worked was borne out consensus. There was no power imbalance, we all had an equal say in decision making; the way we worked developed organically because we had no managers dictating the way it must be done in order to feather their own nests or doing the bidding of their ideologically driven “betters”. The work we did developed from the needs of the people we worked with and from the bottom up. Indeed, the men were interviewed when the report was written on our “model” and they were fully supportive of our methods. It was “Effective Practice” in action.

Finally, I think working in this horizontal participatory way has implications for unions. Horizontalism and full participation necessitates that the hierarchical structures of unions are reduced. People fully involved in their work will simply be more aware and will want to have a greater say in the political direction of their union. I think people would want to be more involved in union activities and we would vote for more time to discuss and vote on issues. Again this could be done on every Friday afternoon each week and if there was some sort of higher decision making body needed we would not send Jim, or Netnipper every time because we know how corrupt they can be. No, we would mix it up to stop power coalescing in a stinking, putrid elite.

We need to break out of the dominant narrative of TINA (there is no alternative). There are millions of ways to organise work, most of them better than the nightmare we currently toil under - TR my arse.

Papa